Friday, May 28, 2010

Pixlr.com is a Free Online Photo Editing Program Very Similar to Phototshop

I often discuss photograph editing in some of the trainings I do. Here is a free online program that allows you to do many things to your pictures. Resizing your pictures, cropping them, making them lighter or darker are some of the basic things this online program will do, but check out the rest of the features available.

One of the options you can use is Pixlr Express which includes three types of controls. Basic allows you to crop, resize (proportionately), rotate or flip your image. The adjustments control gives you the opportunity to remove the red eye, whiten teeth, change brightness & contrast, hue & saturation, sharpen, blur, change the image to black & white and a number of other things. The photo effects control gives you the choice of using 14 filters on your image.

If you want to have more image control choices, use Pixlr Editor. It looks and works very much like Photoshop (not the full version of course). The main toolbox has a rectangular, lasso and the magic wand select tools to select portions of your image, a move tool to move those selections to another window or an image, a clone stamp tool, a crop tool, pencil and eraser tools, paint brush tool, gradient & paint bucket tools, a color replacement tool, blur & sharpen tools, smudge & sponge tools, burn & dodge tools to darken or lighten specific areas of the image, a red eye reduction tool, a drawing tool, bloat & pinch tools, a color picker tool, text tool, a hand tool to move the image in the window and a zoom tool. Those are just the tools in the main toolbox! Pixlr also has a navigator palette, a layers palette to create multiple layers in the image, a history palette to go to a pervious state in the image (similar to the undo command, but much better) and the tool options bar at the top of the window. The menus supply you with a number of options that again are very similar to Photoshop. They give you the ability to create a new file, open an image from your computer or flash drive or open an image from a URL. The edit menu gives you choices such as undo, redo, cut, copy clear, paste, select all, deselect all, invert your selection and the ability to do a free transformation on your image or selection. You can scale, rotate and skew the image or selection. The image menu allows you to change the image size, change the canvas size, rotate the canvas or crop the image. The layer menu gives you the ability to add a new layer, duplicate a layer, delete a layer, merge the pixels in all or some of your layers, rotate a layer, add a mask to a layer or flip a layer. Adding a mask to a layer allows you to do some very fine editing of the image. Pixlr allows you to adjust the brightness & contrast, adjust the hue & saturation, adjust the levels or adjust the curves of your layers as well as many other things. There are 23 different filters you can apply to your image or selection. There is also an online help guide. However, it is a work in progress. So you may find some things missing. Keep in mind this program is free. You have the option to save your image are as a JPEG, PNG, BMP or a PXD which is a layered Pixlr image. You should save it as a PXD if you want to open and further edit the image in Pixlr at a later time.

You also have the option of installing Pixlr Grabber for Windows Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome which enables you to right click on any image on your computer and open it in Pixlr Editor.

8 comments:

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